Psychiatrists and State-Sponsored Violence: Torture and the Death Penalty

BOULDER, Colorado -- The release last week of memoranda detailing the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation program" has revealed another terribly troubling component of this already appalling practice - the role of psychiatrists in abetting the psychological torture of detainees in American custody.

Reports from the Red Cross had already detailed the participation of medical personnel in the CIA's torture program. Psychiatrists conducted evaluations of detainees, and they then disclosed their results to interrogators so that they could best exploit the subjects' psychological weaknesses, such as particular fears or paranoias that they had expressed to the doctor. Doctors also stood by while many of the harshest techniques were used, such as waterboarding, to ensure that the detainees didn't drown, and to revive them if they did. In his blog for Harper's Magazine, Scott Horton had this to say about these "torture doctors":

The conduct disclosed in the Red Cross report would plainly constitute cause not merely for prosecution, but also for revocation of medical licenses. The fact that Bush Administration lawyers wrote made-to-order memoranda saying that the perpetrators didn’t need to worry about prosecution has no bearing on this point–to the contrary it probably provides more evidence of conscious wrongdoing, especially after the memos were exposed and uniformly condemned by the legal community.

We have written on this blog recently about the use of psychiatry as a political weapon in the Soviet Union. We are not anti-psychiatry Scientologist fanatics - not by any stretch of the imagination. But the torture program has explicit ties to the Soviet Union. Many of the interrogation techniques were reverse-engineered from the Pentagon's S.E.R.E. (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program, which trains military personnel to deal with torture at the hands of our enemies, should they be captured. But as Jane Meyer pointed out in the New Yorker in 2007, quoting retired Air Force colnel and interrogator Steve Kleinmann, "It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence." Despite the protestations of Dick Cheney, it is pretty clear that the program yielded little valuable intellegence, while also severely compromising America's moral standing. Perhaps we should not base our interrogation techniques on Darkness at Noon. As Horton points out in his interview on Democracy Now on April 17, we have already put ourselves in dubious company by torturing detainees; impressing medical professionals into the service of torture puts us in even nastier company.

This is not the only example of doctors using their expertise in the service of state-sponsored violence that clearly violates their Hippocratic oath. America's entire death penalty system places medical professionals in a very precarious position. Most states that have the death penalty require a doctor to be on the scene to oversee the administration of the lethal procedure (in the case of lethal injection) and to pronounce death, though no doctor will put the needle in themselves - that is left up to prison staff with varying levels of training. Most states also protect the identities of the personnel involved in the exection, though this still raises many ethical and legal issues. In Washington state, the state physician resigned earlier this year, saying his ethics prevented him from even indirect supervision of executions; then earlier this month, the state's entire execution staff resigned because they feared a pending lawsuit over their qualifications would jeopordize their anonymity.

Some doctors see serious ethical conflicts with the death penalty system, while others have embraced their participation in it. Even if they are not administering the lethal cocktail to execute a prisoner, doctors - especially mental health professionals - play a key role in moving defendants through the system from the courtroom to the death chamber. The Supreme Court has ruled (in Ford v. Wainwright) that it is unconstitutional to execute an insane person. Regardless of the prepoderance of medical evidence, some states are just hell-bent on executing their prisoners, and an entire cottage industry has developed of psychiatrists who will certify that pretty much everyone is fit to be executed.

The most notorious of these doctors was James Grigson, nicknamed "Dr. Death." Grigson testified as a prosecution expert in 150 capital trials, and in nearly all of them, he declared the defendant fit to be executed. He testified in many trials in Texas, where he almost uniformly stated that inmates met an aggravating factor in the state's death penalty statute - that they posed a threat of future dangerousness to the community should they be allowed to live. Grigson was stripped of his medial license by the American Psychiatric Association in 1995 for making such declarations without ever interviewing subjects, and he died in 2004.

Many doctors also find themselves in the position where they must treat a death row inmate to restore him to a state of mental health whereby he becomes fit to be executed. Some doctors have refused; others, like Mr. Grigson, never met an inmate they wouldn't help kill, and they are happy to do the state's dirty work for them, as was the case with an inmate named Claude Maturana in Arizona. After every last medical professional in the state refused to treat Mr. Maturana's schizophrenia, the state conducted a nationwide search, and they found a doctor who was willing to rubber-stamp the death warrant. Maturana escaped the death chamber - he died in 2002 during an operation while still in prison. But his case is just one of many like it.

Some death penalty statutes are also designed to maximize the number of people who can be executed by parsing the difference between "insane" and "mentally ill." Such is the case with Andre Thomas (pictured), who sits on death row in Texas. Thomas was convicted of murdering his wife and two children and cutting out their hearts; since he has been in prison, he has gouged out both of his eyes and eaten them. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (we have written about them before) ruled that Thomas is "clearly 'crazy,' but he is also 'sane' under Texas law."

We may not place political dissidents in mental institutions, but the shocking revelations about the use of psychiatric medicine to torture, maim, and even kill prisoners in US custody are not unique to the US' torture program. Nor are they only found in shadowy, extra-legal government programs. In many states this practice is actually part of the black-letter law, and it is carried out in courtrooms and prisons across the country. Everything about these memoranda is blood-curdling, and the people responsible for authorizing, legitimizing and employing these techniques should be brought to justice, but it is not unique to find people willing to set aside their personal and professional ethics to aid state-sponsored violence.

Wednesday Links: Happy Tax Day

BOULDER, Colorado -- Today we are going to ignore all of the teabagging that is going on across the nation, because those people are nuts and ignorant. Instead, we bring you news about race in America (the two stories may be linked, however), as well as stories about the dastardly deeds of the unhirable fools from the Bush administration and some urban ruins of bygone eras.

Colorado Matters: Come fly the racist skies. Until 1963, there were no black commercial airline pilots in the United States. Carriers actively discriminated against black pilots, claiming that racist passengers would refuse to fly with them if they hired blacks, or that they would not be able to put them up in hotels during layovers in segregated southern cities. Then Marlon Dewitt Green took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Green v. Continental Air Lines that the practice was unconstitutional.

Hartford Courant: Do-over! In more recent race-and-hiring-practices news, my hometown could be approaching a landmark Supreme Court case. A group of 15 New Haven firefighters have taken the city to court over its hiring practices. The men all took a test to determine promotions, and they received the top 15 scores - unfortunately, 14 were white, and one was Hispanic, and there were only 15 promotion spots available. Because there were no black candidates who scored in the top spots, the city decided to hire nobody. The Court will hear oral arguments in the case, Ricci v. Destefano, later this month.

NASHI: All deposed presidents of former Soviet republics may now begin boarding. Everyone's favorite government puppet right-wing youth movement, Nashi, demonstrated earlier this week at the Georgian embassy in Moscow to show their "solidarity" with the Georgian people who are clamoring for President Saakashvili to resign. They've even bought Mikhael a ticket to DC, where everyone (especially John McCain) loves him. It's worth noting that these are the same people who were baying for the blood of every last Georgian during last summer's war over South Ossetia.

The New Yorker: Mr. Feith, there are some men here to see you. They have a warrant. At looks like at least six members of the Bush administration can look forward to a life like Henry Kissinger - that is, they can never leave the country, and probably can't travel to some US states, for fear of being arrested. British attorney Philippe Sands first identified the "Bush Six" in his book Torture Team, and Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has upheld the indictments of the former officials on charges of torture.

Strange Maps: The Rochester Subway. From 1927 to 1956, Rochester, NY, once one of America's most successful boomtowns, had its very own subway. The system consisted of a single line that was placed in the former bed of the Erie Canal, which had been diverted around the downtown. Today, all that remains are a few concrete trenches and overpasses.

New York Times: Keep smallpox alive. One of New York Cities oft-forgotten islands is the quaint Roosevelt Island, located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Perhaps it's forgotten because for most of its history it has been home to prisoners, mental patients, and people suffering from wildly-infectious diseases. Now the city is trying to keep part of that history alive by restoring the ruins of the island's famous smallpox hospital.